I had two extremes of work yesterday: three hours in the garden, four hours of meetings.  I enjoyed the balance of using my body and using my mind.

My two two-hour meetings were in my capacity as Planner, which I realize I haven't written much about here on the blog.  We're looking at some difficult decisions right now about communal resources vs. individual resources, in this time of "austerity" since we lost Pier One as a hammocks customer.  We're having to make even more budget cuts than we did last year, and it really falls on the shoulders of the Planners to decide where all the cuts are going to be made.  (and all Planner decisions can still be overridden by a simple majority of the members here)

My morning meeting was with the Transportation Council, about some recent decisions they posted about changes to the vehicle policy as attempts to save the community some money.  In order to make our cars last longer, they decided to limit the mileage for all the cars to 500 miles round trip; if someone wants to take a car farther than that, they have to rent one.  They also decided that the community should stop subsidizing one of the trips into town each week, the Friday night "fun" trip (it's been a free trip for a few years, and now anyone who wants to take a car in will have to pay for it).  Both decisions were appealed to the Planners (any council decision can be appealed by anyone, and then the Planners decide whether to uphold the council decision or overturn it).  The Planners all met with the Council to hear why they made the decisions, and to communicate the concerns of the people who made the appeal. 

We talked about all kinds of community issues: primarily, the balance of communal  vs personal responsibility for resource use.  We're looking at cutting allowances by $10 a month next year (bringing the personal spending allocation down to $61 a month), and we're also talking about raising vehicle rates by 10% (22 cents a mile for small cars).  When we're making it more expensive to take a car into town AND cutting down on the money that's available for people to spend, is it really worth it to cut back on the communal trips into town?  Cutting the Friday trip would save the community about $1000 over the course of a year.    There's a small (maybe 5-15) group of people who use the free trip on a regular basis, and the rest never or rarely use it.  The folks who do use it can still go in, and just split the cost of the car amongst themselves.  More incentive to carpool... I don't know what we're going to decide on this one.  If we uphold the Council decision, there's likely to be a community override posted.

After this meeting, I worked in the garden for 3 hours, soaking up the Noveber sun.  I whacked dried asparagus stalks with a machete, grunting and growling with the pure delight of rampant destruction.  After finishing and throwing the decapitations off the Edge of the World (a treeline where we throw weeds and other undesirables of the garden), we weeded leeks and transplanted kale.  Ahh...

and then right off to another meeting!  This one was an ad hoc group that we scheduled for exploring the possibility of developing an "Income Quota" policy, which would require each member to do a certain amount of "income-producing" work each week.   Right now, anyone can do whatever work they want to do, as long as it totals to our quota of 43 hours a week.  We're looking at this new possibility because we're currently having trouble getting enough hammocks and tofu made.   All kind of questions came up in the meeting, including:

ahh... I'll write them later.  I have a date to go play on the Playground of Death, the "adult" playground here.  It's quite treacherous, and lots of fun...

On Thursday night we had a "coffeehouse" in the Hammock Shop.  Twin Oaks "coffeehouses" are basically open-mic nights, where anyone can get up in front of the audience and perform anything.  This one was specifically scheduled to correspond with a hammocks "push," in which we were trying to get 282 hammocks made by the end of the week (which at Twin Oaks, ends on Thursday in a weird-yet-effective attempt to avoid the horror of Mondays, by making the first day of the week Friday, which is an inherently satisfying day, it seems).

And so, on Thursday night about 40 people gathered in the hammock shop to make lots of hammocks and share appreciation for each others talents and non-talents.  There was a belly dance, a puppet show, several songs, some readings from books (a section from Barbara Kingsolver's "The Bean Trees" about an all-too familiar scene in a cooperative house), and a fashion show of a homemade dress.  I ran up to my room and grabbed my GRE practice test, and performed a dramatic reading of some of the questions.  "Two cars leave from the same place, going in different directions..." and so on.  Lots of folks groaned, and a few grabbed pencils and tried to work out the equations.  Afterwards I had at least 5 people come up and ask to have a study-date with me to practice analogies and the quadratic equation, their minds hungry for academic stimulation.  Three people here used to be turors for all the various grad school entrance tests, and they love this kind of thing.

Moving forward with the whole grad school thing... I went into Charlottesville yesterday to meet with the head of  graduate admissions in the Sociology Department at UVA.  We had a long chat about the nature of the department and grad school in general.  I got terrificly excited to get the chance to talk passionately about sociology and why I want to teach, and that was reaffirming for me.  I enjoyed most of the people I talked with, including a few graduate students currently working on their dissertations.  Could that be me in a few years?  Perhaps... I'm still uncertain about what I want to be doing... so I'll continue to move forward on this track and make the decision when it's actually right in front of me.

Here I am in Ann Arbor, at the annual Institute for NASCO, the North American Students of Cooperation.  The organization is largely focused on student co-ops at universities, but also includes community co-ops and food co-ops and worker-owned cooperative businesses.  I've had a roller coaster of a day -- I presented a few workshops with the lovely Sky Blue (author of the article I posted here yesterday).  They went okay; some folks were inspired and others not (they fill out evaluations afterwards).  After presenting the workshops I got into a major mind spin around the work that I'm doing in the world, wondering if I'm "earning my keep".  I have so many opportunities and possibilities to take advantage of (class background, college education, public speaking skills, the commune) that allow me to support my life through presenting workshops and sitting in meetings and doing a few hours a week of physical labor in the garden and tofu hut.  Is the work I'm putting into the world really valuable enough to the world that it provides for my basic needs and desires?  Especially with leaving the commune, my oasis of non-oppressive living, I fear that I'll fall right back into the mode of benefiting from my own capability to navigate through a system that is at its core oppressive.

blech.  All of this has been up for me in the last few weeks.  And now being here at a conference focused on the cooperative movement, as I'm stepping away from living cooperatively.  So yet again, I'm asking myself "why?".  I'm passionate about cooperation and collaboration!  Why am I moving my life specifically away from that?  Grad school?  I don't know.  I'm wanting something else in my life, more connection with the larger world.  Is grad school really going to provide that?

For the past few months I've been co-editing a column for a new DC paper,  The Washington Spark.  I work with my friend  Sky Blue (the name his parents actually gave him!) on a column called "Beyond the Box", which focuses on radical and alternative lifestyle possibilities.  So far, we've covered the Farm commune, car co-ops, Network for New Culture, Burning Man, and support work for Katrina victims being done by folks from the Rainbow Gathering.

Sky recently wrote a message to the editors' email list, about the struggles of working on a cooperative project like the Spark.  It's an independent, volunteer-based paper, and each month we struggle with everyone getting things in on time and following the requests of the managers for word count, photos, and other details.  I thought Sky's email was an insightful reflection on what it takes to work cooperatively, and I thought you all might enjoy it, too.

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The challenges we face with the Spark I think are highlighted by the fact that news media is typically run in a highly hierarchical manner and working cooperatively is pretty far removed from what most people are used to.

The way the Spark is structured and being runs puts a huge amount of responsibility and grants a huge amount of autonomy to the people working on the project, in particular the column editors.  This is of course a double-edged sword.  In my experience many if not most people perform better under deadlines and supervision.  Left to our own devices we tend to put things off till the last minute.  I tend to think of this as largely due to social conditioning.  Being told what to do and when to do it by is what we're used to.  We tend to need something motivating us.  Making personal choices and commitments and sticking to them, especially when there are no consequences like being fired, getting a poor grade, being evicted because you didn't pay the rent, having your boy/girlfriend angry at you, is not something we're particularly practiced at.

The Spark presents us with a great challenge.  Given that the work is volunteer we all must be starting from a place of idealistic belief, passion, or some other perspective or attitude that motivated us to even volunteer in the first place.  But looked at in certain ways the project is non-essential, neither to our lives nor the lives of others.  This can be argued philosophically but it is true from the perspective of our practical and visceral experience.  The only bad thing that's going to happen if I don't get my column in on time is that the issue might be late and some people might be inconvenienced.  This is not much skin off my nose. But in that perspective is the death of cooperative group endeavors and activist endeavors that have a more creative and less tangible
impact on the world.

If we fail to have a strong sense of empathy and compassion for the people whom we are inconveniencing by not following through on what we said we would do we are missing a key aspect of the motivation that will make success possible.  Again, lack of follow-through has little in the way of adverse effect on our personal lives. We need to take on a sense of ownership, collective ownership.  If we don't see our role, however small it may be, as being crucial to the success of the project then the people who care more about the project and are more committed to it will end up picking up whatever pieces gets dropped.  This is a great recipe for burn-out, martyrdom, and resentment.

In terms of the creative and less tangible aspect of the Spark, I would say that there are easily measurable results produced by the paper.  38 pages, 30,000 copies, and over 500 distribution points on a monthly basis is no small accomplishment.  But what impact does that actually have?  We have various anecdotal experiences of people saying great things, and the recurrence of advertisers is a good indication as is the rate at which the paper is picked up from the distribution points.  But that's still not much.  What I think is really required here to give us the motivation to be solid on producing issues is a sense of long-term vision and a leap of faith.  The vision has to do with the transforming or replacing of the mainstream institutions providing various services with those based on a vision of a sustainable, peaceful, and socially and economically just human society.  Providing viable alternatives to all mainstream institutions, media being a key example, is crucial to true revolution.  The leap of faith has to do with the fact that we can't really say whether what we're doing is really helping to change the world for the better, we just have to follow our hearts and trust ourselves that we're doing the best that we know how at this point and that we'll continue to learn and change and do even better.  This is the long-haul not the quick fix version of revolution.

What a lot of this boils down to as well are issues of ethics and integrity, primarily in the realm of doing what we said we would do.  If we aren't prepared to do what we said we would do we need to not make those promises.  So while the agreement of what we're saying we're going to do is made with others, in the context of a cooperative group endeavor, the commitment to follow-through must based within ourselves.  We must make it matter to ourselves because no one else is going to make us do it.  And this is what we want isn't it?  We want to be living in a cooperative, non-heirarchical society right? This is an opportunity to make that happen.

- Sky Blue, Nov 2005

A college student doing an independent study wrote to me a few days ago, asking a bunch of questions about life on the commune.  We get stuff like this all the time, and sometimes it's a pain in the ass to answer the same questions over and over again.  We've finally compiled a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) document and posted it on our website, so we can just direct people to look at that.  This student, though, asked some questions that aren't included in the FAQ, and I took some time this morning to write back to her.  I thought all you Over the Edge fans might enjoy reading my answers...

I was wondering if you would discuss some possible pros and cons of living in a community? 
a quick list off the top of my head:

PROS
- deep relationships with the people I interact with on a daily basis (instead of passing anonymous people on the street or having vague superficial interactions with cashiers and other people whose work I depend on)  In community, I know all of the people whose work supports my life -- and beyond simply KNOWING them, my work suppports their lives, too!  Our interdependency is vividly tangible.
- collective decision-making:  I have direct access to the decisions that affect my life instead of the decisions being made by politicians who have never met me and aren't aware of the impact their decisions will have on my life.
- homegrown food, without pesticides or the exploitation of workers
- homegrown culture, without the commodification of women's bodies and the glorification of consumerism
- parties where I know everyone
- not my job to worry about bills (someone else has decided they'll do that work)
- access to valuable shared resources (woodshop, sauna, industrial kitchen, massage tables, pond, playgrounds...)

CONS
- collective decision making: I have to share decisions about what to spend money on, how many pets we're going to have, car use, nudity norms, etc.  I don't get to decide for myself, I have to negotiate with 100 people who don't all have the same values as me.
- no weekends, there's always more work to be done, and even if I choose to take a day or two off, all of the work that needs to be done stews in the back of my mind
- no escape from people you don't get along with.  In a group of 100 people who all know each other and have lived together for years, there's inevitably some folks who don't like each other.  You're in community meetings together, you get scheduled for work with them, you have to ask them a question about something they're in charge of, you live in the same building as them...

a lot of these might be specific to Twin Oaks, and not so applicable to other communities (especially ones of different sizes)

What is the difference between a cooperative and a community? 
ahh, terminology...  I'm just making this up off the top of my head: I think of a cooperative specifically in terms of decision-making (there are food co-ops and worker-owned cooperative businesses).  A cooperative is a group where everyone involved works together to make decisions.   A community is a more general sharing, maybe more holistic (though not necessarily).   A community might share any or all of: land, values, common interests, projects.  The term "community" is a lot more vague.  We live in a "global community" because we share this earth.  There's a "dance community" in New England who get together once a year for a dance conference.  I think it's possible for a community to not be a cooperative, but I think any cooperative falls under the broad label of community.

Do you feel like you lose any personal freedom living at twin oaks?  If so, what?
Sure, it's a sacrifice of one level of freedom in order to gain another level.  I don't cook my own meals, so I don't decide what I'm going to have for dinner.  I have to be quiet in my residence after 10pm.  I don't have my own car, so it's hard for me to audition for a play in town because I can't be sure I'll always have car to drive in for rehearsals.  The space I have as my own personal, private room is relatively tiny.

  Why twin oaks? 
When I was looking for communities to visit, I knew I wanted to experience a place that had been around for awhile and was relatively stable.  I wanted to experience a different way of life that was actually sustainable, not a pipe dream that was going to fail in a few years. When I came here for my 3 week visit, I met people who I felt a strong connection with and I enjoyed the work in the garden.

Are you happy there? What defines happiness?  What is happiness and is it different for everyone?
I could pontificate for days about the nature of happiness.  I'm not going to go there this morning, though I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on it.  The basic answer about my happiness here is that I feel fulfilled in some very basic ways.  I engage in emotionally healthy interactions most of the time.  My body is healthy and strong because of the work I do and the food I get to eat here.  I have a high level of freedom to express myself creatively without judgement from others.  When these needs are fulfilled, I'm happy.  And there are other ways that I'm not fulfilled here, and I'm planning to leave in January to pursue other things.  I want to have access to more of the world on a regular basis.  I want to travel.  I want to study sociology and teach college classes.  These are things I can't do here.  I would have some unhappiness (though I wouldn't necessarily be unhappy) if I stayed, because I would have unfulfilled dreams and desires that I wasn't working towards.

  What is religion and how does it manifest at twin oaks?
I'd say that religion is a set of beliefs about the nature of reality.  Religion is up to the individual at Twin Oaks, and I often wish that we had a more cohesive collective understanding about the nature of reality!  Religion and spirituality don't play into our discussions about decisions very often, and I wish it did more so that we'd have a clearer sense of purpose and intention.

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Well, that's been my morning today -- thinking and writing about life at Twin Oaks while I look out the window at the clothes on the line blowing in the wind and the leaves on the trees chaning colors before my eyes.  Virginia has embraced autumn just in the course of a few weeks, and suddenly it really feels like fall!  With the time change last weekend, it's now dark before dinnertime and we're no longer eating at the picnic tables outside.  Change change change... everything changes, it's the nature of this life.

"I'm moving on"... lyrics from a country song that are stuck in my head this afternoon.  I remember singing it loudly in the car as I drove away from my apartment in Cincinnati three and a half years ago with everything packed in the back seat.

I'm getting more comfortable with the idea that I'm moving on from Twin Oaks.  It's a beautiful place, and I love the life I have here.  My mission for myself is to see how I can carry the lessons I've learned here into the great big world beyond these 450 acres.  How do I maintain the self-confidence and sense of empowerment in a culture rooted in hierarchy?  How do I carry my love of my roundness and soft curves in a culture that holds another image of female beauty?  How do I interact collaboratively with people who expect me either to defer or demand?  These are my missions.  It's too easy here -- I need these challenges, to develop tools for myself and hopefully for others who ask these same questions without knowing what's possible.  Twin Oaks is my seed of hope, planted in my center, a vision of possibility that will (hopefully) keep me going when I feel hopeless.